New Leaves
by LadyToFu
Summary: The former Hokage expects great things from his namesake grandson Sakurano Naruto, but Naruto wants to be the Pirate King! New chapter: Uchiha looks, Uzumaki brains... the plot thickens
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1: An Introduction**

**Uzumaki Naruto**

A chill breeze cut through the warm spring sunshine and swept through the village, sending icy fingers down Uzumaki Naruto's back as he walked out onto his balcony. The Hokage robes draped over his bent frame fluttered around him, spots of bright color against the stark grey of the building. He walked slowly over to the balcony's edge, and sighed. He seemed to be doing everything slower these days. Though with much less stealth, he noted as the metal tip of his cane beat a steady rhythm against the stone floor. Kakashi probably turned-over in his grave the day he ordered it, but wooden canes just broke too easily.

His leg never had been the same after his last battle with the Sasuke-bastard, but then, no one had come out of that without a scar.

Naruto leaned up against the balcony railings, and fumbled around his jacket for a cigarette and lighter. It was a nasty habit, he knew, but picking it up had been far, far easier than giving it up. He'd quit twice before, but after Hinata passed last year, he found his afternoons littered with the little death sticks once again.

He lit up a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs before letting it out in a white cloud. He tried to blow it so the wind would draw the smoke away from him, but the wind refused to cooperate. He supposed the Konohamaru brat would complain about the smell on his robes. Well, they'd be Konohamaru's soon enough, then he could keep them as clean and smoke-free as he wanted. A smile spread across his face at the thought, what a surprise that was going to be! Konohamaru had more or less resigned himself to being an ANBU captain and (more than occasionally) Naruto's assistant; convinced Naruto would be Hokage forever.

But, Naruto would be turning sixty-five soon, and while he still felt strong enough to take down a million brats, he knew it was more than time to step aside for the next generation. Though, in all honesty, he'd hoped that one of his own would continue the family tradition. He sighed, turning his gaze down onto the streets of Konoha, filling with people out looking for lunch.

To Naruto's chagrin, not one of his children had chosen the ninja way. His oldest, Jiraiya, was currently in the Earth Kingdom filming a movie. According to his last letter, he was playing a pirate king in some new action thriller. Sasuke had, of all things, apprenticed himself to the Ichiraku Ramen Shop, and taken over it a few years back. And his youngest, Tsubame, had passed her chuunin exam and decided to be a teacher. NOT a ninja teacher, oh no, she had chosen to be a regular village teacher at a regular school for regular children.

And Hinata, being Hinata, cheered her children on until the day she died, and forbid Naruto from saying a word or interfering. Well, she had been right, he admitted. Their children had had happier lives than either of them, though (secretly) he hoped some of their grandchildren might choose to return to the ninja world.

Well, he hoped at least one of them would anyway, even if he was born only days before. He found his thoughts and eyes drawn toward the left of the village, focusing on a little pink house near the old Uchiha compound. Sakurano Naruto, they'd named him. Naruto could still feel the baby, the weight of him in his hands. He'd been so tiny, his little fingers batting at Naruto's. And, despite being only hours old, the child had pulsed warmly with chakra, a true product of his Uchiha/Uzumaki blood. It was love at first sight. Sakura had been thrilled. Sasuke might have been too, Naruto thought, in the end. Hinata definitely would have been.

Naruto put out his cigarette, throwing the butt into an ashtray someone (likely Konohamaru) had left nearby. Maybe he should quit again after all. Tsubame was talking about having eight more, though Saito looked rebellious, and Sasuke's first was due any day now. Once he retired, he planned on spending a lot of time with his new grandchildren and smoke was, after all, very bad for babies.

Well, he wouldn't be training them for a few years yet. They'd have to be at least seven, he nodded to himself as he walked back inside. If he taught them Sexy no Jutsu before that, Tsubame might get mad.

**~ 13 YEARS LATER ~**

**Uzumaki Chiyori**

Ninjutsu practice was, to put it mildly, not going well--Not that any mix of genjutsu or ninjutsu had ever gone terribly right for Naruto. Of course, Torabito-sensei insisted he just needed more focus and practice.

So, Naruto decided to try it. Sort of. The first clone had been okay. At least, it was the right size and color, mostly. But, then he'd tried to clone Inuzuka Roya, and everything went wrong.

"Naruto, baka!" She'd shouted at him before running off, "You're the worst ninja ever!"

"Roya!" shouted Torabito-sensei as he ran out after her.

Puzzled as to why she was so angry, Naruto scratched at his thick black hair and dismissed the clone, before shouting, "I am NOT! And, baka yourself, I'm fourth-to-last in our class!"

Chiyori cringed, "Naruto, I'm not sure that's any better."

The other students began to snicker but, after a glare of death from Chiyori, wisely chose to stay silent and return to their seats. She might look small and delicate, but Chiyori had a temper like a lightening storm and could be just as lethal.

"Of course it's better." Naruto snorted, rubbing absent-mindedly at his dark grey eyes. "Fourth-to-last means there are at least three ninjas worse than me, so I can't be the worst ninja ever."

"Right, but… Nevermind." Her cousin, Chiyori had learned long ago, was an absolute idiot. A lot of it was, admittedly, because he chose the underachiever's path to life and only bothered to learn things applicable to his love of pirates. But, he also was really and genuinely obtuse sometimes. Their parents blamed their grandfather, but since Chiyori was hardly an idiot in any respect, she couldn't quite understand why.

"I don't even get why she's so mad." Naruto wailed, strangely echoing part of her thoughts. He went back to his desk and plopped down into his chair. He leaned over, resting his head on his desk with a low thud.

"Naruto, you made her look like a pile of dough with raisins stuck in it for eyes." She sighed, going back to her seat too.

"Okay, yeah. But, you could totally tell it was her. I mean, the hair was absolutely perfect!" He replied, covering his head with his arms, as if to protect himself from the evils of thinking.

"I'm pretty sure that was part of the problem."

"Forget this. Pirates don't need Bunshin no Jutsu. This is what I get for paying attention and practicing!" Naruto folded his arms up and crossed them under his head, closing his eyes, and looking for all intents and purposes ready to take a nap.

"I don't think doing a jutsu twice in class counts as much practice, you stupid pirate nerd." Chiyori muttered, pulling out an issue of Icha Icha Kids. It was safe enough. By her calculations Torabito-sensei, who had a bit of a tendency to panic, would take at least another 15 minutes to get calm enough to remember to come back to class.

"I did practice! I tried it once yesterday." Naruto turned his head just enough to flash a grin at Chiyori full of perfect teeth and ridiculously long eyelashes. Not for the first time, Chiyori noted that he was probably better looking than most of the girls in their class. He'd have been popular if it wasn't for his Uchiha lineage.

"You actually did school work outside of…" Chiyori began, not bothering to look up from her book despite being mildly impressed. It **was** decidedly unusual for Naruto to do work outside of school.

"Well, the RedLeg Pirates' execution ended early so…"

"You idiot liar," cut in Nara Saburo, kicking Naruto's chair from behind. "Stop trying to excuse your stupidity. You can't produce a clone after only three tries."

"I can." Replied Naruto, turning and kicking Saburo right back. "Because, I'm a genius."

"What like all the other Uchiha scum, Mr. Fourth-to-last-in-our-class pirate freak." Saburo, who was in fact second in the class and worked extremely hard, had several duplicates of Naruto's failed Roya clone ring Naruto's desk, then kicked his chair again, hard.

Chiyori slammed her book shut with a thump, and whipped around to throw a warning glare at Saburo.

"Want to repeat that?" She asked just a little too nicely. This never happened when their grandfather was in town, but he'd been living with the frogs for the past year.

"Brat, stop harassing Naruto, Naruto, stop causing trouble, Chiyori… IS THAT WHAT I THINK IT IS ON YOUR DESK?"

That voice did **not** belong to Torabito-sensei. Chiyori felt her stomach sink as heavy steps came through the classroom door and stopped in front of her desk. She turned around slowly, only to see a familiar face staring intently at the book on her desk.

"H-Hatake Ji-chan?" She managed to deduce it from the silvery-blonde hair, but there was little else to give away his identity. He was dressed from head to toe in a typical jounin uniform of green and black with most of his face covered by a black mask. "What are you doing here? Why do you have a mask on?"

"Ah sorry, I forgot." he replied, pulling the mask down. "They were spraying my building for roaches. And, I'm confiscating this."

"It's not confiscating if you're taking it to read it, then it's pirating," Naruto pointed out with a snort as Hatake Norio took Chiyori's copy of Icha Icha Kids off her desk.

"It is if I'm a teacher," replied Norio with a smile. "You should call me sensei, by the way, Shrimp One and Shrimp Two."

"Who in their right mind would let you teach children?" Demanded Naruto and Chiyori simultaneously.

Norio's smile got even broader. "Who said anything about teaching? I'm a teacher, but I'll only be teaching if my students pass their genin exam."

"The genin exam?" Chiyori felt her already roiling stomach hit her shoes at the thought of the upcoming test, though she had little doubt she would pass.

"Scared?" Norio asked leering first at Chiyori then at Saburo before cackling. "Because you should be."

Naruto snorted, and put his head back down on his desk.

"Oh? Shrimp One, you seem very confident."

"Because I'm not taking it, oh Master Pervert," replied Naruto, rather matter-of-factly.

Chiyori, along with every other person in the class, turned to stare at her cousin. "What?!"

Naruto sat up and looked around, before shrugging and sprawling back down onto his desk. "What's the point of being a genin? I'm going to be a pirate."


	2. Chapter 2 New Chapter

Author's Note: I'm sorry about any confusion, but I decided to take out the original ch. 2 and replace it with this one for various reasons that will potentially come up in future chapters. Think of the original ch. 2 as non-canon filler? :) In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this & if you don't please let me know. A lot of this writing is about learning to write for me, so please feel free to spread the love/hate/constructive criticism.

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**Sakurano Naruto**

Running away from home and becoming a pirate, it turned out, was not nearly as easy as it should have been. Of course, nothing really was when your mother was half-Hyuuga.

Stupid ninja bloodlines, grumbled Naruto under his breath. Stupid Chiyori and her stupid blabbing, big mouth. So he wanted to be a pirate? What was the big deal? Just because she was so excited about taking the genin exam, didn't mean he had to be too. Besides, on the scale of things he could choose to do with his life, wasn't kick-ass pirate really a much better choice than being a let-me-be-broody-and-kill-things ninja? Pirates had freedom on the high seas, and hats. And, treasure. Well and, really, coolness. But apparently his mother didn't like pirates and didn't care about how awesome being the pirate king would be.

In fact, his mother had been keeping an eye on him…from all 360 degrees of direction…since he'd gotten home from school. She'd already caught him trying to slip out one of the downstairs windows, and made him clean the bathrooms as punishment. Who knew sneaking past her would be harder than toilet-papering the Hyuuga compound? She wasn't even supposed to be a ninja anymore!

Naruto crept out of his room with all the stealth he'd accrued from 13 years of late night ninja-style snack filching (and the occasional prank on a creepy Byakugan obsessed cousin or three). Keeping one hand on the wall for balance, he took a few deep breaths and concentrated on really seeing in the darkness. Soon enough, he felt a kind of warm pull in his head as chakra pooled behind his eyes. Naruto concentrated harder. He'd found lately that sometimes when he really tried, he could see in the dark and almost make out the glow of chakra lines, even if only for a minute or two.

Fortunately, that was all he needed. Snaking his head around to make sure he had a complete view all the way down into the kitchen (and the back door), Naruto quickly memorized the placement of every object and piece of furniture, even the positions of the floorboards outlined in his temporary, black-and-white vision of the world.

Alright! He congratulated himself, step one was complete. Closing his eyes, Naruto ran through the now-perfect mental map in his head and plotted out a course. Roll onto the rug to the left, then he'd be at the stairs, but the dark floorboard protruding slightly at the head of the stairs looked loose, which meant that he'd have to jump over it to keep from making noise. But then his mother might hear the stairs creak. No, if he could jump from the rug directly onto the banister, he could swing down over his father's potted lemon tree, and land between the rubber plant and the giant cactus, giving him a clear straight-run shot at the kitchen and back door. All without making a sound.

Just in case, Naruto ran through a couple more potential routes, and a few back-up/escape scenarios. If he got caught, he couldn't use the "a very sad ladybug flew inside and asked me to set her free and that's why I'm halfway outside" excuse he'd used earlier that day. No, he'd have to escape back to his room. Then, he could blame it all on sleep-walking.

With a smile for his sheer genius, Naruto stepped away from the wall and cat-rolled, landing perfectly onto the rug. Staying in a low crouch, he steadied himself with his fingertips before launching himself onto the banister.

Like clockwork, Naruto congratulated himself again, as he levered himself down between the rubber plant and the giant cactus. Step two was complete, now he just had to run through the French doors into the kitchen, out the back door, and then onward to become the pirate king. Perfect.

"Naruto, you do realize you're trying to sneak outside in the middle of a storm, right?"

Naruto tried his ninja-pirate manly best not to act surprised. And, for the most part he managed not to—until his right foot got tangled with his left foot as he scrambled to get up—causing him to fall into the arms of a rather prickly giant cactus. Fortunately, the thought of his dear mother making him scrub toilets again for trying to sneak out kept him from whimpering too loudly after an initial shrill yelp.

Not that Naruto's father was being terribly solicitous of his be-needled boy. His father would have said he tried his best not to laugh, but Naruto would have said he didn't try very hard since Sakurano Saito was still snickering as he helped pull cactus needles out of his son's arms some minutes later.

"So, what were you going to tell you're mom if she woke up?" Saito asked his bleeding son when he finally managed to stop snickering.

"Sleep-walking," replied Naruto, ruffling out his dark hair to make sure no needles had decided to nest there too. His hair was getting a bit long.

"Ah," managed Saito before turning around just a little too slowly to hide the grin threatening to split his face. Naruto glared at his dad. The two of them looked a lot alike, he knew, though Chiyori always said his dad looked much more refined. But, personality-wise, his dad was just plain strange.

Naruto never understood what his dad found so funny all the time, particularly in situations like this when his poor son was bleeding to death in front of his eyes, but at least one of them was having a good time. And, no, Naruto was not being sarcastic and full of self-pity. Though, actually, and more to the point, "Hey Dad, where'd you come from anyway? I didn't hear you come down the stairs at all."

Naruto had come to expect a certain amount of stealth from his mother. She was his mother, after all, and a ninja academy graduate besides. But, his dad was a florist. Albeit, from a ninja bloodline, but even so, how did a florist sneak up on him?

"Well, my observant ninja…"

Naruto snorted in protest.

"…sorry, _pirate_ son, you see my very wet hair and clothes? That would be because I didn't come down the stairs, I was outside and came in through the garage."

"Outside, in a storm? Why?" Asked Naruto, genuinely puzzled. It wasn't really like his dad to go running around in the rain in the middle of the night. Naruto and his mother, absolutely, but his dad was supposed to be the mature adult in the family.

"Hmmm…" Saito tilted back in his chair until he was peering at his son over his perfectly sculpted nose and chin. Casually, and without looking away, Saito brushed some of the water that kept dripping from his hair, off his shoulders with long, slender fingers. Naruto noticed an unfamiliar gold ring on one of his fingers. It had something red and white embedded in the middle. As he looked from the ring to his father, for a brief instant, Naruto thought he saw his dad's eyes turn sharp as if he were searching his son for…something…but then his dad was his dad again, and Naruto wondered if he'd just imagined it.

"I think that's a story for another night," he said, giving Naruto's head a friendly push. Slowly, he lowered his chair back down to its proper four-footed stance. Naruto wanted to ask him about his ring, but before he could say anything, Saito put up a hand warning him into silence. He pointed upstairs, and gave his son an (almost) sympathetic look, "Especially since, I think we woke your mother up. Now would probably be the perfect time for any last-ditch escape plan you might have?"

Two hours and several jutsu later, Naruto crawled into his bed feeling generally miserable. He'd had to contort himself to fit under the ottoman in the living room at one point, and his cacti-wounded limbs had not responded well, especially since he and his dad apparently missed a few cactus needles in his pants.

On the upside, his mother hadn't caught him, so he had no toilet scrubbing to dread. Although, in the end, she hadn't emerged from her bedroom for nearly half an hour after Naruto's father had warned him away.

Safely ensconced in his blankets, part of Naruto kept naggingly pointing out that he'd totally been had by the old fart. His ingenious plan to run away and become the pirate king had been crushed by his dad's timely arrival, his escape plan (while technically successful and brilliant) ended up being (from a strictly temporal perspective only, of course) a bit pointless and again instigated by his father, he still had his genin exams coming up (since his mother refused to let him leave and become a pirate, and admittedly this one was not his dad's fault), but to top it all off, now that he'd had some time to think about it, the old man hadn't told him a thing about why he was wandering around at night in the middle of a storm wearing strange jewelry.

Diabolical. Naruto growled a bit into his pillow. Well, he'd figure it out. His dad couldn't keep secrets forever, at least not from a genius of strategy and manipulation like him. Today was Wednesday, so he'd have it out of him by Thursday…Friday morning at the latest. And with that taken care of, Naruto would have nothing left to do but fulfill his destiny.

Excellent, he had plans for the rest of the week. First, get out of the genin exam. Second, figure out dad. Third, escape mom. Fourth, run away and become the pirate king.

All good goals, except for maybe number three. Naruto sat up, biting at his lower lip. Now **there** was a real problem. His ride to Wave Country had said he could only wait one week maybe a week and a half at the latest, but his mother was Watching him. Stupid ninja bloodlines. If he hadn't already been banned from the Hyuuga main house (Tiny incident involving seran wrap and the dojo door. It was hilarious right up until Grand Uncle Neiji woke up), he would've been tempted to go wreak some anti-bloodline limit vengeance in fuschia paint. Though, in all seriousness, he probably wouldn't get two steps out the door before his mother caught him.

If only his grandfather were back. Naruto mulled the idea over and liked it. Grandpa Uzumaki was ten times stranger than Naruto's father, or pretty much everyone else, but his mother always spent so much time panicking or yelling or laughing whenever grandfather was around, she probably wouldn't notice her son was gone until he was sailing from ocean to glorious ocean. He was the perfect distraction.

That night Naruto crossed his fingers and crossed his toes before reaching up to turn off the lights (which was not easy with crossed fingers). Here was hoping Grandpa Uzumaki came back to Konoha before the weeks end. Not that he really believed in that elementary school crap, but hey, this was his dream on the line, anything was worth a shot, right?


End file.
